I’ve been beginning my blog posts for a while now with an image. Sometimes, such as the two recent posts about the “white homo demons” preacher, they have been images used to illustrate the news article to which I was linking. Others have been editorial cartoons, memes, photos I’ve taken myself, or images from other sources on the internet. Whenever possible, I include the copyright holder or source of the image in the ALT tag of the image.

Occasionally the place I got the image from is a tweet or other re-blog that doesn’t have the original source. When that happens, I try to track down the source with Google Image Search, but some images have been re-blogged so many times, the original source doesn’t come up in the search. Then I try to the read the EXIF data from the image, but often there’s nothing useful there, either because it’s been stripped out along the way, or in the case of web comic images and the like, it was never there.

If I were being really scrupulous, I oughtn’t to use the image at all at that point. After all, I have more than one artist friend who has found their work being used, without their permission, on t-shirts or other items for sale somewhere, and heard their rant about their failed attempts to get the people who stole their work to, at the very least, acknowledge who made it.

But, often I go ahead and use the image. I rationalize that I’m not profiting from it and that I’ve done due diligence trying to locate the source to give credit. But it’s a rationalization. Should I feel guilty about that?

Probably. And maybe I should start going the ultra-scrupulous route: don’t post it if I can’t find the source and link back to it. I’ve certainly ranted enough about people using the excuse the “everyone else is doing it” in the past. There’s such a rant about a recent news story sitting in my draft queue right now. I had been looking for a good “hypocrite” image, and had found a great one (much more interesting that the Shutterstock image above), but couldn’t find the original source to give credit.

Then I got an email from someone wanting permission to use an image I’d used in a post months ago. I had to explain that I’d found the image on iLounge, and so didn’t have the right to give permission, because it wasn’t my image.

Even though that image did have the URL for the source of the image, the URL is in the ALT tag, and most people don’t even know how to view that. So, even when I am pointing to the source, most people don’t realize it.

What to do… what to do?